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      Morgan Taylor, Inventive Children’s Performer, Dies at 52

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      His popular character Gustafer Yellowgold was aimed at youngsters and, more generally, “people who enjoy humor and absurdity and good pop music.”Morgan Taylor, a children’s performer who with fanciful songs and hand-drawn animation drew youngsters into the world of Gustafer Yellowgold, a saffron-colored explorer from the sun who shared a house with an eel and enjoyed music by a rock band made up of bees, died on Aug. 11 in Miamisburg, Ohio, near Dayton. He was 52.His death, in a hospital, was caused by sepsis, said his wife, Rachel Loshak. Mr. Taylor, who lived in Chatham, N.Y., was visiting family and friends in Ohio when he became ill.First in his native Ohio and then, beginning in 1999, in New York City, Mr. Taylor toiled for years in relative obscurity as a guitarist in minor rock bands and a sound engineer. Occasionally, for his own amusement, he would record nutty songs he’d written. About 20 years ago, his wife, a singer-songwriter, suggested he try writing a children’s book, and he went back and gave those nutty, just-for-him songs another listen.“I had accidentally built this entire universe in these scattered pieces that all fit together as I wrote song after song over the years,” he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2011. “All I had to do was shake the sieve.”One ditty in particular, “I’m From the Sun,” inspired him to create Gustafer Yellowgold, whom Mr. Taylor introduced in 2005 in a CD and DVD, both called “Gustafer Yellowgold’s Wide Wild World.” He developed a stage show to go with that release, singing songs from the record while animated videos he had made played on a screen.Mr. Taylor said his Gustafer songs and stories — two of his albums received Grammy nominations — were “about the roller coaster childhood can be.”The target audience was younger children, but Mr. Taylor was nothing at all like Raffi or the Wiggles. His songs had a rock sensibility and, he hoped, wouldn’t make parents cringe.“It’s really for adults,” he said in 2011, “and it’s really for people who enjoy humor and absurdity and good pop music.”He performed his Gustafer shows all over the country, including at Symphony Space in Manhattan, where Darren Critz, the director of performing arts programs, was always glad to book him.“Morgan’s music, through Gustafer Yellowgold, reflected everything a parent could dream to see in their kids’ lives: joy, a love for life, creativity, wonder, and even a touch of rebellion,” Mr. Critz said by email. “All of it encouraged kids just to be who they were, and to never stop growing into who they wanted to become. What a great gift for parents to be able to share these ideals with their kids through music, rather than a pep talk that would inevitably bring about toddler-style eye-rolls.”Mr. Taylor released a series of Gustafer CDs and DVDs over the years, and they grew more ambitious as they went along. “Gustafer Yellowgold’s Infinity Sock” (2011), his fourth release, was the first to have a narrative thread (Gustafer searches for the toe end of the longest sock in the universe), which carried through all 10 songs.“For me it’s easy to make up stuff that’s freaky and funny,” he told The Dayton Daily News of Ohio that year. “The challenge is to pull it into some semblance of organization, so I thought it was important to have a plot. It was a good challenge for me because it’s easy to be absurd, but I wanted it to be absurd and linear.”Mr. Taylor’s songs were full of colorful word juxtapositions — one was called “Wisconsin Poncho,” another “Melter Swelter” — and the kind of absurd plotting that makes perfect sense to a child. The song and video “Gravy Insane,” for instance, told the story of a family of bats that was adept at making gravy and had to establish an impromptu gravy store on the roadside when its gravy-laden truck jackknifed (“’cause bats can’t drive,” the lyric explained) and the spilled cargo drew a crowd.“Gravy Insane” appeared on “Dark Pie Concerns,” a 2015 Gustafer release that was nominated for a Grammy Award for best children’s album. “Brighter Side,” released in 2017, was also nominated.Morgan Andrew Taylor was born on Sept. 5, 1969, in Kettering, Ohio, near Dayton, to Gordon and Elizabeth (Young) Taylor. At his memorial service on Aug. 18 at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton, among the stories told about him was one that noted his ability, as a child, to imitate an assortment of sounds convincingly. His version of the end-of-the-period school bell was so accurate that he would sometimes get his class dismissed early by employing it, leaving whichever teacher he victimized baffled as to why no other classes were funneling into the hallways as Mr. Taylor and his classmates were sent on their way.He graduated from Kettering High School and attended a local college for a time, though he never completed a degree. More formative than classroom learning, he said, was his discovery in 1988 of the Minnesota rock band Trip Shakespeare.“I was completely blown away and became obsessed with their music,” he told The Pioneer Press of St. Paul, Minn., in 2011. The infatuation is why, when he developed Gustafer’s origin story years later, he had the creature arrive on Earth by landing in a Minnesota lake.After playing in bands in Ohio, Mr. Taylor moved to New York in 1999. He found a job as a sound engineer at the Living Room, a Lower East Side club that showcased local musicians. Ms. Loshak sometimes performed there, and, as Mr. Taylor recounted to The New York Times in 2006, one night “she stayed after her gig, and we talked, and all of a sudden the sun was coming up and we were kissing on a street corner.”They married in 2004. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their two sons, Harvey and Ridley; his mother; a brother, Grant; and a sister, Ann Wiseman.Mr. Taylor built Gustafer Yellowgold into a modest franchise, which included plush toys he designed. He also had a radio show on WKNY in Kingston, N.Y., and had recently created a podcast about Trip Shakespeare.John Munson, that group’s bassist, memorialized Mr. Taylor in a statement.“He made the realities of growing up less scary for all of us,” he said, “parents and children alike.” More

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      ‘Bluey’ Is About Everything, Especially Music

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      “Ladies and gentlemen! I will now play for you the ‘Rondo alla Turca.’”From the first scene of “Bluey,” the hit Australian canine cartoon that amusingly, frankly and ever-so-understandingly takes the hands of children and parents through the escapades of the Heeler family of heelers, classical music is as much a part of playtime as the toys scattered around their suburban Brisbane home.Bandit, the stay-at-home, try-to-work father who, with Chilli, his wife, has become the idol and the envy of parents everywhere for his willingness to entertain his children anywhere, anytime, anyhow, is on the floor, with his 6-year-old daughter, Bluey, draped over his knees. He cracks his knuckles, takes on airs and tickles her mercilessly to the tune of the Mozart sonata. Bluey’s adorable 4-year-old sister, Bingo, watches, begging to be the piano herself.“Magic Xylophone,” the first seven-minute installment of the three seasons currently streaming on Disney+, is notionally about the importance of taking turns. But like most episodes of “Bluey,” it’s also about far more than the immediate lessons it teaches through the Heelers’ antics, at least in the giggly way that the show is “about” everything from family and friendship to marriage and mortality.Amid the slapstick, “Magic Xylophone” is about the power of music to transform us. Bingo finds a xylophone in a toy box, one with the make-believe ability to freeze people in place. Once stuck, they can be subjected to all manner of embarrassments — such as when the girls’ target is their father — or pleaded with to share, as when Bingo ensnares Bluey. All the while, we learn that “Bluey” is going to be no ordinary children’s show in another way, too: This is a show that repays listening, as well as watching.As the girls have their fun, the Mozart sticks around, becoming the basis for a strikingly well-crafted score that stays enchantingly true to the spirit of the original material even as it deviates wildly while the girls argue with their mother, or suffers from comical wrong notes when Bluey and Bingo fight. By the end, Mozart’s rondo has found its way to major-key joy, and the girls have, too, sitting arm in arm as their father sprays himself in the face with a hose.“BLUEY” DID NOT NEED to have music this good. “Peppa Pig,” for instance, its predecessor in fickle toddlers’ hearts, sometimes plinks and plonks to make a point, but its music usually does little more than start and end another episode in its endless cacophony of oinks.But the producers of “Bluey” intend its episodes to be thought about as short films instead of televisual fodder, and the scoring has a cinematic quality that helps make it the kind of show that parents might want to actually watch rather than curse from a distance.“I always knew that music was going to be almost half the show,” Joe Brumm, its creator, said in an interview, explaining his admiration for the role of sound in films like “True Romance,” “The Truman Show” and “The Thin Red Line.”“I didn’t want the usual kids’ TV scoring,” he continued. “Some shows just use one track for an entire season, or a variation of it. I’d worked on ‘Charlie and Lola’ years ago, and they had a couple of musicians who played multiple instruments, and every episode had its own score. So that was the norm for me; it’s definitely not the norm for a lot of shows.”The music of “Bluey” is a collaborative endeavor, but it is primarily the task of its composer, Joff Bush. Bush, 37, switched from jazz piano to composition as a student at the Queensland Conservatorium, and he later attended the Australian Film Television and Radio School. He leads weekly, hourslong Wednesday sessions, at which Brumm and others talk through the philosophy and the psychology of an episode while he improvises at the piano, before later writing a score. It’s work that Brumm is so proud of that he has given Bush his own character in tribute, a musician called Busker.Far from every episode of “Bluey” uses classical music, and Bush’s tastes are eclectic. Some of its more than a hundred shows take inspiration from folk, jazz or rock, and almost all of them are then filtered through what Brumm calls the distinctively “jangly” sound that comes from Bush’s collection of old guitars and his habit of ignoring his mistakes. Even when Bush does color with the classical canon, there is a charmingly offbeat oddness to his work, something that helpfully reminds you that no real family could possibly be as agreeable, as forgiving or as functional as the Heelers, however much your children might reason otherwise.“There’s a humanness to it, I hope,” Bush said.THERE IS A LONG HISTORY entwining classical music with animation, one that dates back well beyond Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit!” to strains of Wagner in “What’s Opera, Doc?” “If cartoons have become associated over time with any one musical genre, it is classical music,” the musicologist Daniel Goldmark writes in his book “Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon.”But the Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1930s to the ’50s used classical music as an “endless source of jokes at the expense of concert hall culture,” Goldmark writes. When concert music and opera were more prominent than they are now, many viewers had certain expectations about Romantic-era music — Wagner most of all — that could easily be subverted, and puncturing its pretensions with a cartoon rabbit was anyway inherently funny.“We do actually steal that approach, sometimes,” Bush said, “taking these grand things and messing with them.”Sometimes Bush does that with glee: A squabble in “Ice Cream” gets sprinkled with absurd grace when Bluey and Bingo waltz, tongues wagging, to Tchaikovsky; their divalike cousin Muffin has become associated with music from “Carmen”; even Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” gets trotted out in “Escape” as the girls dream of chasing down parents who dare venture out for a night. Sometimes the nods are less obvious, as when Elgar drifts in to accompany a crowning ceremony in the backyard paradise of “Rug Island.”Bush is certainly interested in breaking down elitist ideas of what classical music should be — in showing, as he puts it, “that these are great pieces of music, and they don’t have to be heard in a concert hall where we’re all sitting quiet. They can be for everybody.”But Bush — unlike the composers of the Warner Bros. era, and at a time when classical music is less widely known if still set high on its lonely pedestal — tends to do this less through satire or mockery than by remaining somewhat faithful to the composers themselves, whether to the cheekiness of Mozart or to the intricacy of Bach.And there is a lot of Bach in “Bluey”: a Brandenburg Concerto’s counterpoint as a girl-gang’s game of nail salon on a tree stump intertwines with their fathers’ manly-man efforts to chop it up in “Stumpfest,” for example, or a prelude from “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” its already disjointed theme broken up by Bush and made to flow only when the girls successfully deliver a love letter that resolves a parental fight about the trash in “Postman.”There are also episodes that reward thought, like “Bingo.” Bluey goes out for the day, leaving Bingo to struggle by herself while Chilli endures her own traumas trying to fix a toilet. Bush chose a solo piece to illustrate solo play, Mozart’s “Sonata Facile” for piano. “The melody is this little loop,” he said, “it’s this idea of Bingo starting again and getting stuck.”There’s a deeper message in that choice of music. The Mozart looks so simple on the page — and sounds like it, too — that it’s easy to forget that it can be devilishly hard to get right. So too is playtime, for children on their own. Or plumbing.“Any pre-Romantic music, you’ve got free rein,” Bush said. “So much of that is about the beauty of the music itself, rather than ‘This is a sad piece; be sad.’” You can really mess with the music a lot more, without hitting on any meanings.”“THERE’S NOTHING WORTHY going on,” Brumm insists when asked whether this is all part of a grand plan to educate children in music appreciation, à la Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” even if as an occasional classical listener he sees nothing wrong with getting them interested in it. Bach is available to use without a licensing fee, after all, and the composer isn’t around to protest a misuse.During weekly sessions where the show’s creators talk through the philosophy and the psychology of an episode, Bush improvises at the piano, before later writing a score.Natalie Grono for The New York TimesBush feels likewise, as much as he revels in seeding slivers of Saint-Saëns across an episode so that he can drop the big entry from that composer’s “Organ” Symphony at the climactic moment in “Calypso.”“I don’t think we ever approach it from the place of getting kids into classical music, or anything like that,” he said. “It’s always about the story, about what feels right and fits.”Nowhere is that narrative honesty more brutally effective than in “Sleepytime,” Bush’s balletic masterpiece, which turns the nightly nightmare of getting a family some sleep into an outer-space emotional epic to the sounds of Gustav Holst.Using “Jupiter” from Holst’s “The Planets” for “Sleepytime” was Brumm’s idea, but Bush’s execution is sublime. Carefully, he teases the intervals of its famous theme whenever we glimpse parental affection, giving it an ethereality when cuddles are involved, or an impudence when Bluey pops up to ask for a glass of water then inevitably needs Bandit’s help as she goes to pee.Only when Bingo finally keeps her promise of sleeping in her own bed — “I’m a big girl now,” she tells the sun, a symbol of Chilli’s comforting embrace in a dream inspired by a book about the solar system — does Bush unfurl Holst’s melody in its full splendor, marking the glow, the nobility, the certainty of a mother’s love.“There’s a time in a child’s life when they are starting to build their own identity, and their own independence,” Bush said. “The idea that they are going alone but their parents’ love will always be there is such a powerful one. It needed to be something like ‘Jupiter’ that is bigger than what it is.”You know what’s coming, and when it does, it lands with the devastation of an asteroid strike; the domestic turns into something sublime. Good luck not crying. More

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      It’s Alive! It’s With the Band! A Computer Soloist Holds Its Own

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      Voyager, a computer program, played with Ensemble Signal in the U.S. premiere of a George Lewis piece that was a highlight of this year’s concert calendar.Two guest soloists, each skilled in the art of improvisation, appeared in New York City on Friday night with the cutting-edge chamber group Ensemble Signal.One soloist was human: Nicole Mitchell, the veteran flutist, composer and bandleader whose albums and performances are regularly (and rightly) celebrated by jazz critics.The other soloist was a computer program — called Voyager — that can listen to live performances in real time and offer improvised responses. Originally programmed in 1987 by George Lewis, the composer, performer and computer-music pioneer, Voyager’s discography is slighter than Mitchell’s, but likewise thrilling.On a 1993 CD for the Avant label, Voyager played the role of a real-time improvising orchestra — alongside Lewis’s trombone and the saxophone of Roscoe Mitchell (no relation to Nicole Mitchell). By the time of the 2019 RogueArt album “Voyage and Homecoming,” Voyager had been updated to perform — next to those same soloists — on a computer-controlled Disklavier piano. This, in turn, has made it possible for Voyager to enter into the tradition of the distinctive soloist, partnering with orchestras or chamber groups like Signal.On Friday at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Hell’s Kitchen, Voyager improvised on a concert grand Yamaha Disklavier, sharing the stage with Nicole Mitchell and members of Signal. These forces united to give the U.S. premiere of Lewis’s “Tales of the Traveller,” the final composition on a program presented as part of this year’s Time:Spans festival, which runs through Saturday.Lewis’s material for Signal is fully notated. But his score gives an improviser no notes to play — nor does it specify the instrumentation or number of improvising soloists. (The composer offers only entry and exit points for soloists.) Lewis merely gives soloists some advice regarding what not to do, when entering the fray. “Direct imitation of melodic or harmonic passages is to be avoided,” he says, referring to what the chamber group is playing. So what should the improvisers do? “Strategies for dialogue with the written music include blending, opposition or contrast, and transformation.”Without question, this was a lot of to-do for a 20-minute-plus performance at the end of a single show. But as “Traveller” unfolded, it proved a highlight of the year’s concert calendar, thus far, in New York.In large measure, this was because of Lewis’s instrumental writing for the chamber group. You could take Voyager out, and “Traveller” would still sound vivacious — full of high-stakes drama and responsive good humor. (The 2016 world premiere performance of the work by the London Sinfonietta involved only a single human improviser.)Lewis has been on a particularly strong chamber music run in the last 10 or so years. This hot streak has included larger-group efforts like “The Will to Adorn” and “As We May Feel” — as well as more intimate pieces like the “The Mangle of Practice.”In these works, and in “Traveller,” you are often immersed in instrumental density — quick rhythmic accelerations and parched sound-production textures. But paradoxically, these moments rarely feel abrasive (as in some other forms of modernism).Even when the music whips up complex, noisy nimbuses of competing motifs, the fast, finely judged changes within the dense activity are preparing you for variations on the weather. And, soon enough, there’s a clearing of skies: The music decelerates and makes room for melodic fragments that are voiced more sweetly. From there, you’re taken to the in-between states, with varieties of gradation. You get the sense that the suggestions Lewis lays down for his improvisers in “Traveller” — de-emphasizing imitation, and promoting contrast and transformation — are similar to the directives he charges himself with when composing.On Friday, the Disklavier piano was turned toward the audience, allowing viewers to watch for the moments when the Voyager software — running on a nearby computer — elected to depress the keys of the Disklavier.“It’s alive!” I thought — with a monster-movie watcher’s delight — when the piano first started playing, quietly. But since “Traveller” also has a part for a human pianist within the chamber group, you had to pay close sonic and visual attention to discern which pianistic choices were Voyager’s.Mitchell was a guest soloist with Ensemble Signal on Friday. On Saturday, the International Contemporary Ensemble performed her composition “Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity.”Stephanie BergerFor all that techno-drama, it wound up being Mitchell who took the early, demonstrative lead in improvising — with some fluid, songful passages that added a depth of lyricism to the boisterous material for Signal. During this stretch, Voyager limited its contributions to fluttering, high register filigree. And it sometimes chose silence.But since improvisation is also about knowing when to listen, that was no mark against the software’s intelligence. And when Voyager decided to make a forceful, fortissimo statement, late in the piece — in a relatively quiet passage for the chamber players — the provocation felt right on time. During the applause, as the conductor Brad Lubman made a gestures to both soloists, there was some laughter when he encouraged an ovation for Voyager. But the computer program had earned its plaudits.This was the kind of performance that you want to hear in a residence, night after night. The improvisations would be different. And the notated music would be great to hear multiple times. But that’s not the world we live in. So while Lewis’s duos for live players and electronic partners are performed with some frequency, the star-soloist turns for Voyager — in the company of many human partners — are more rare.Time:Spans is to be commended for producing the concert, even for a single night. This festival — put on each August by the Earle Brown Music Foundation — specializes in filling just this kind of contemporary-music niche. In past years, Time:Spans was where you could find important local premieres by John Luther Adams or works by comparatively lesser-known members of the Wandelweiser school. And it’s the rare festival at which you’ll also find members of Freiberg, Germany’s SWR Experimentalstudio.In addition to Signal’s hugely entertaining take on Lewis’s “Traveller,” Time:Spans has already presented several other rewarding concerts this year. In a single week I enjoyed gigs by the quintet Splinter Reeds, the Argento New Music Project chamber ensemble and the International Contemporary Ensemble.The ensemble’s set on Saturday had many points of connection with the Signal show — in part because of the presence of three other works by Lewis. Enjoyable as those were, the brightest moment of that concert was a contribution from the pen of Mitchell, “Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity.” (This concert was entirely for human players.)Written for the cello, violin, flute, a percussionist and a clarinetist (who doubled on bass clarinet), the 10-minute piece was often powered by a succession of duos within the quintet; these vivid episodes were often connected by gloomy but propulsive motifs played by the percussionist Levy Lorenzo.This week brings sets by the JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire and the Talea Ensemble. Tickets are affordable; the acoustics grand. It’s a reason to hang around town in the depths of summer swelter. More

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      Woman Testifies R. Kelly Sexually Abused Her on Video When She Was 14

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      The woman testified at the singer’s federal trial in Chicago that she had been persuaded not to testify against him at his 2008 state trial, which ended in his acquittal.CHICAGO — In 2008, a jury in Chicago declared the singer R. Kelly not guilty of producing child sexual abuse imagery after seeing a videotape that prosecutors said showed the R&B singer engaging in sex acts with an underage girl. The defense team had argued that the identities of the people in the tape were in question, and several jurors said the lack of testimony from the victim was a significant barrier to convicting Mr. Kelly.But on Thursday, the woman at the center of the 2008 trial took the stand, identifying herself and Mr. Kelly as the people in the infamous video, saying that they had sex “hundreds” of times when she was underage, and explaining how two decades ago he had persuaded her to deny their relationship to law enforcement officials.“I was extremely scared that my parents would find out,” she said, adding that she was afraid of what would happen to Mr. Kelly.Mr. Kelly has been trailed by accusations of abusing young women and underage girls for more than two decades but had long avoided criminal punishment — until last year, when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted in federal court in Brooklyn of racketeering and sex trafficking charges.Before that, the 2008 trial was the closest Mr. Kelly had gotten to being held accountable.The woman at the center of that trial, now 37, took the stand at the Everett M. Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in downtown Chicago, where she said that she had been repeatedly sexually abused as a teenager by Mr. Kelly and testified that it was in fact her at age 14 appearing in the videotape, which at one point shows Mr. Kelly urinating on her.Testifying under a pseudonym for more than four hours on Thursday, the woman told the court that in 2002, after law enforcement officials had obtained the tape, Mr. Kelly sent her and her parents out of the country to make them inaccessible to investigators. He then urged her to deny to a grand jury that it was her on the tape and paid for a lawyer to accompany her, she said. She testified that she had falsely told the grand jury that it was not her on the videotape and that she was not sexually involved with Mr. Kelly. She said that she gave Mr. Kelly’s lawyers a necklace of hers that could be seen on the videotape.As the woman spoke, Mr. Kelly — who is facing charges of coercing minors into sex, receiving child sexual abuse videos and conspiring to obstruct justice — remained impassive.The woman told the jury that she was 13 years old when she was first introduced to Mr. Kelly by her aunt, a protégée of Mr. Kelly’s who goes by the stage name Sparkle. Mr. Kelly, who became the woman’s godfather, started speaking sexually with her over the phone, she said, then started abusing her physically. She testified that Mr. Kelly would sexually assault her at various locations, including his home, the recording studio and his tour bus.The tape surfaced after a journalist for The Chicago Sun-Times who had reported on the accusations against Mr. Kelly, Jim DeRogatis, received it in the mail from an anonymous sender, and turned it over to law enforcement. Mr. Kelly was charged in 2002 with producing child pornography, and he stood trial in 2008 but was acquitted.The woman testified that around the time of the trial, she was living with Mr. Kelly in his mansion, and that after he was acquitted, he began physically abusing her and controlling her ability to leave. He later helped her move into her own place and get a car, she said.A lawyer for Mr. Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, who is expected to cross-examine the woman on Friday, sought to undermine her testimony in opening arguments, telling the jury that she has an immunity deal with prosecutors. The woman affirmed that in exchange for her testimony, prosecutors had granted her immunity from prosecution for perjury related to the false grand jury testimony in 2002.Prosecutors say that they now have more evidence of the woman’s abuse than the state prosecutors had 14 years ago. The 2008 trial focused on one video, but the current trial centers on four videos that prosecutors say show Mr. Kelly sexually abusing the woman. Those videos are the basis for charges against Mr. Kelly related to producing child pornography, as well as the ones related to receiving child pornography.According to the federal indictment, Mr. Kelly and his associates realized in 2001 that videotapes of him sexually abusing the woman were missing, and as a result, they began a multiyear effort to recover the tapes, paying one person hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to regain possession of them.Charges against two of Mr. Kelly’s associates, Derrel McDavid and Milton Brown, who are standing trial at the same time as Mr. Kelly, relate to accusations that they had tried to find the missing tapes. Both men pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers have argued that they were carrying out their jobs, unaware that Mr. Kelly was abusing children.Later on in the trial, four other women are also expected to testify that Mr. Kelly sexually abused them when they were girls. More

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      Abdul Wadud, Cellist Who Crossed Musical Boundaries, Dies at 75

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      He performed with classical ensembles, but he was best known for his work with cutting-edge composers and improvisers like Anthony Davis and Julius Hemphill.Abdul Wadud, a distinctive cellist who crossed genres and was a key collaborator with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis, died on Aug. 10 in Cleveland. He was 75.His son, the R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of multiple recent illnesses.Mr. Wadud converted to Islam while in college but continued to use his given name, Ronald DeVaughn, when playing with classical ensembles, as he did with the New Jersey Symphony in the 1970s.He also performed in Broadway pit bands and with Stevie Wonder. But he is best known for his work with Mr. Davis, the saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill, and others who were central to the development of American composition and improvisation in the late 20th century.Skilled at eliciting variations of instrumental color with a bow, Mr. Wadud pioneered a pizzicato language on the cello that was sometimes subtle, sometimes booming.For many of his contemporaries, the first taste of his instrumental prowess came via his appearance on Mr. Hemphill’s 1972 album, “Dogon A.D.” (Like many important recordings featuring Mr. Wadud, it is currently out of print.)Over the title track’s unusual loping groove, Mr. Wadud supported Mr. Hemphill’s saxophone lines with crying, bluesy bowed phrases as well as some select, forcefully plucked notes. Baikida Carroll, the trumpeter on that session — and, like Mr. Hemphill, a member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group — remembered Mr. Wadud’s insightful questioning during rehearsals about that composition’s 11/16 meter.“He asked Julius about the relation of the drum part and the cello part, how they hook up,” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview, adding that he “pointedly observed” Mr. Wadud’s working methods “because I was, like, This is the cat!”The composer, trombonist and scholar George Lewis said in an interview that he regarded Mr. Wadud’s playing on “Dogon A.D.” as a landmark of 20th-century music. He tied that performance to Mr. Wadud’s later solo recording, “By Myself,” which is also out of print.“There’s the electricity — he’s amplified — there’s the funk, there’s the off-meter; a lot of the stuff that turns up being crystallized in ‘By Myself’ is sort of foreshadowed in ‘Dogon A.D,’” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s like James Brown — but I bet even James Brown couldn’t have done it if it had been in 11/16.” (A 1977 live performance of the piece is included on a boxed set of Mr. Hemphill’s work, released in 2021 by New World Records.)Mr. Wadud did not record much of his own music, aside from his 1977 solo LP, but his solo work had an impact. Writing in The New York Times about the Abdul original “Camille,” from “By Myself,” the cellist Tomeka Reid praised him for using “the whole range of the cello” and moving “between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work.” In a recent interview, Ms. Reid added, “What Pablo Casals did for the Bach suites, I feel like Abdul Wadud did for the new generation of cello in jazz.”Around the time of “By Myself,” Mr. Lewis chose Mr. Wadud for an ensemble that performed the Lewis composition “Monads,” his attempt to “come to terms” with the graphic scores of the composer Morton Feldman.“Abdul knew all about that kind of thing; he knew more about it than I did,” Mr. Lewis said. “That combination, of having the strong kind of Black bass and having all these other possibilities — equally strong — made him someone you could work with who was super versatile and could do anything.”Similarly, the clarinetist J.D. Parran noted that “you could run into Abdul Wadud anywhere.” He remembered with particular pleasure seeing “this gigantic smile” on Mr. Wadud’s face during their tour with Stevie Wonder, in support of the album “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.” (Mr. Parran added that Mr. Wadud was the contractor for the ambitious, larger than usual outfit Mr. Wonder used on that tour.)Mr. DeVaughn, Mr. Wadud’s son, recalled his father offering his ear when Mr. DeVaughn was recording his album “The Love Reunion.” “He went with me to a couple studio sessions,” the son said. “And he would make some cool suggestions.”Mr. Wadud in concert at Washington Square Church in Manhattan in 1990.Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos/Getty ImagesRonald Earsall DeVaughn was born on April 30, 1947, in Cleveland, the youngest of 12 children of Alberta Miller and Edward DeVaughn. He studied at Youngstown State University and Oberlin College in Ohio and, though accepted to Yale for graduate work in performance, chose to attend Stony Brook University, on Long Island, for his master’s degree, so that he could study cello with Bernard Greenhouse of the Beaux Arts Trio.In 2014, in one of his last interviews, Mr. Wadud said of Mr. Greenhouse: “He had the ensemble background. At that time, I was thinking if I wanted to do something in classical, it would be in an ensemble, an arranged quartet, piano trio, or something of that nature.”Mr. Wadud clinched some of these chamber music ambitions in the 1980s as part of a stellar trio with Mr. Davis and the flutist and composer James Newton.“A lot of people have spoken about his pizzicato playing, but I was also excited by his arco tone,” Mr. Davis said in an interview, referring to Mr. Wadud’s use of the bow. “He had a unique sound, a beautiful sound. I think James and I were both so excited; it opened up so many avenues in terms of our composition, to create pieces for him.”When the trio performed with the New York Philharmonic, as soloists in an orchestral performance of Mr. Davis’s “Still Waters,” there came a distinct moment of respect for Mr. Wadud’s musicianship, Mr. Newton recalled.“The principal cellist in the orchestra at that time said, ‘Mr. Wadud, what is the fingering that you’re using for this phrase?’” Mr. Newton recalled saying to himself, knowing the Philharmonic’s reputation for icy welcomes, “We got ’em.’”At the same time, Mr. Davis had unwittingly spoiled Mr. Wadud’s strategic use of his dual musical identities, in which he went by his original name, Ronald DeVaughn, for classical gigs while saving the name Abdul Wadud for improvisational work. “He was laughing,” Mr. Davis remembered, “Because, he said, now I had busted him: People in the classical world knew he was Abdul Wadud.”In addition to his son, Mr. Wadud is survived by a daughter, Aisha DeVaughn; a brother, Marvin DeVaughn; a sister, Floretta Perry; and five grandchildren. He was married and divorced twice.Shortly after recording the album “Oakland Duets” with Mr. Hemphill in 1992, Mr. Wadud retired from playing. Mr. Newton said of that decision: “I think when people believe that you’ve changed an instrument, as he did, the level of what they’re looking to hear every night is not always easy.” Citing Mr. Wadud’s ability to operate in so many worlds, he said, “You add all of that together, and the pressures are not minimal.”Ms. Reid said she had tried to coax Mr. Wadud back into playing. He was the guest of honor at the 2016 edition of her Chicago Jazz String Summit. And she repeatedly told him how influential he was.But a revival did not occur. “He was just so humble,” Ms. Reid said. “And I think he was happy that I even reached out to him.” She added that many record companies have since approached her, wondering if Mr. Wadud would be interested in reissuing “By Myself.”Mr. DeVaughn, Mr. Wadud’s son, said that just such a release remains in the cards. “I plan to definitely keep the torch burning,” he said, “and having that stuff put on vinyl.” More

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      Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call It Brainfeel.

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      Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call It Brainfeel. On March 25, 2020, Chris Gleason was in bed at his parents’ house in Pennsylvania, thinking up ideas for videos that might go viral. Just before graduating from college with a musical-theater degree in 2019, he took a job at a nautical-themed restaurant in the […] More

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      Willie Nelson’s Long Encore

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Willie Nelson has a long history of tempting, and cheating, death. In 1969, when his home in Ridgetop, Tenn., caught fire, he raced into the burning house to save two prized possessions, his guitar and a pound of “Colombian grass.” He has emphysema, the consequence of a near-lifetime of chain smoking that began in childhood, when he puffed on cedar bark and grapevines, before turning to cigarettes and then — famously, prodigiously — to marijuana. In 1981, he was taken to a hospital in Hawaii after his left lung collapsed while he was swimming. He underwent a voluntary stem-cell procedure in 2015, in an effort to repair his damaged lungs. Smoking has endangered his life, but it also, he thinks, saved it: He has often said that he would have died long ago had he not taken up weed and laid off drinking, which made him rowdy and self-destructive. Now, in his late 80s, he has reached the age where getting out of bed each morning can be construed as a feat of survival. “Last night I had a dream that I died twice yesterday,” he sang in 2017, “But I woke up still not dead again today.”Still, some close calls are closer than others. One evening in early March 2020, the singer and his wife, Annie, were sitting outside the sprawling log cabin residence at their ranch in Spicewood, Texas, in the Hill Country about 30 miles northwest of Austin. It was warm and clear. The sun was going down. “We were watching the sunset,” Annie recalled not long ago. “And these little lights started to zip across the sky. The first one kind of flashed past in the distance. Then there was a second, which went by a little closer. All of a sudden, the light went right past us — like, two feet over Will’s head.”The couple scrambled into the house and got down on the floor. According to Annie, the neighbors were “having another one of their gun parties. Apparently they got drunk and left a bunch of kids with semiautomatic rifles.” The police, she said, explained that the lights came from tracer bullets. “I said, ‘Are those even legal?’ But of course, nuclear weapons are legal in Texas. I told the police to please just pass along this message: ‘Dude, you don’t want to be the one that kills Willie Nelson. Especially in Texas.’” “Anyway,” she said, “that was the beginning of our Covid quarantine.”Days earlier, Nelson played for a crowd of more than 70,000 at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Now cities were going into lockdown. Given Nelson’s age and underlying conditions, a deadly virus that attacked the respiratory system was a frightening proposition. So the Nelsons hunkered down in Spicewood, where they were joined by their adult sons — Lukas and Micah, both musicians — and Micah’s wife, Alex. For the first time in decades, Willie Nelson was staring at an empty calendar. For several months, only Annie left the ranch, once a week, to buy groceries. Nelson and his sons played lots of poker, dominoes and chess. Nearly every evening, the three would gather in the living room with their guitars to sing Nelson’s songs and old favorites by the likes of Hank Williams and Roger Miller. “It kept us sane, sort of,” Lukas says. “My dad was bored. He was anxious. He was in a state of existential dread, fearing that this thing he’d done his whole life would never come back.” Nelson tried to keep busy, meeting with a physical therapist for online sessions, sitting for Zoom interviews and performing livestreamed benefit concerts. But his famous tour bus sat by the entrance to the ranch, uncharacteristically idle.Nelson has spent much of his life on tour buses, answering the siren call of the Interstate and the concert hall. “I can’t wait to get on the road again/The life I love is making music with my friends,” he sang, decades ago. There are thousands of songs about roving troubadours, but “On the Road Again” must be the most joyful and unabashed. For Nelson, barnstorming the country with a hot band is pure freedom. There was a moment, in the 1990s, when he pulled himself off the road, signing a contract for a six-month residency at a theater in Branson, Mo. But his cabin fever grew so acute, he wrote in his autobiography, that he took to “pitching a big sleeping tent in my hotel room and pretending I was out in the woods.”Now, during the pandemic, he was marooned again. “Every day,” he says, “it was more and more like a prison sentence.” Sometimes, he would sit in his parked tour bus, “just to pretend I was going somewhere.” “At the end of every tour, Will talks about retiring,” Annie says. “ ‘I think I might retire.’ But then we’ll have a conversation: ‘Well, what would you do if you retired?’ We both know the answer: Just lay down and die. It’s impossible to imagine him not being out there.”Willie Nelson and his band onstage in Austin, Texas, in April.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesFor as long as anyone can remember, Nelson has been opening his concerts with “Whiskey River.” No one is certain when he started; when you’ve had a career as long as his, the math can get fuzzy. A newspaper reviewer once wrote that the song had been Nelson’s opening number “since the dawn of time,” a claim that stretched the truth, but not by much. The best guess is that it was installed as the set-opener around 1974, which would mean Nelson has sung it at the start of something like 6,500 shows. When you take your seat at one of his concerts, you know the scene that will unfold: A small man with a bandanna and braids will amble onstage, strap on a scuffed nylon-string guitar and launch into a famous chorus. “Whiskey river, take my mind/Don’t let her memory torture me/Whiskey river, don’t run dry/You’re all I’ve got, take care of me.”That’s more or less what transpired this April 29 at Austin’s Moody Center, a new 15,000-seat arena on the campus of the University of Texas. Some 9 months earlier, Nelson’s pandemic concert moratorium had come to an end. That night, he was a warm-up act, opening for another legend, George Strait — at 70, a spring chicken compared with Nelson, and by some measures the most popular country artist of all time, with dozens of No. 1 singles and album sales of nearly 70 million. But Nelson doesn’t play second fiddle to anyone, especially in Austin. The Moody Center sits less than a mile from the university building that, for decades, housed the soundstage for “Austin City Limits,” the live-music TV showcase indelibly associated with Nelson and the outlaw-country movement he spearheaded in the 1970s. Today, “Austin City Limits” is taped in a theater on Willie Nelson Boulevard, the downtown thoroughfare where you’ll find an eight-foot-tall Willie Nelson statue, cast in bronze. There are other works of Nelson-themed public art around town, including a giant “Willie for President” mural that is a magnet for Instagrammers. Shops are full of Nelson merchandise: bobbleheads, shot glasses, T-shirts emblazoned with song lyrics (“Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die”) and bad puns (“Austin is Willie Weird”). George Strait might be a megastar, but in Austin, and nearly everywhere else, Willie is a deity. In 2019, Strait recorded “Sing One with Willie,” a cheeky complaint about how Nelson — who has performed duets with countless artists, from Sinatra and Joni Mitchell to Snoop Dogg and Jessica Simpson — had never bestowed the honor on Strait himself.It was just after 8 p.m. when the house lights dimmed and Nelson took the stage, wearing a straw cowboy hat and a T-shirt that read “I Stand With Ukraine.” Recently, he had switched to performing while sitting down, a concession to age. Video screens suspended from the ceiling captured close-ups of the singer: handsome, white-bearded, with a face as craggy and weather-beaten as a desert outcropping. He gave his usual greeting (“How y’all doing?”), hammered on a chord a half-dozen times and, sure enough, the strains of “Whiskey River” rippled across the arena.When Nelson first recorded the song, in 1973, it was an outlaw-country anthem, a woozy blend of honky-tonk and funk and blues — a sound more redolent of weed than whiskey. Its lyrics sketched the story of a spurned lover with a death wish; it was the testimony of a drowning man. But at the Moody Center, Nelson delivered it with a sly twinkle, like a song about a pleasure cruise. It was a festive occasion, after all: Nelson’s 89th birthday, and also the release date for “A Beautiful Time,” his 97th studio album (give or take; there are conflicting counts). It was unclear how many of those in attendance were aware of these milestones, and Nelson didn’t call attention to them. He simply went to work, leading his four-man band through a set that featured hits (“Always on My Mind”), classics from his songwriting catalog (“Crazy”), jazz standards (“Georgia on My Mind”) and hymns (“I’ll Fly Away”). The crowd at Nelson’s concert in Austin.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesA Willie Nelson concert is a study in efficiency. He packed 20 songs into an hour, dispatching with most in three minutes or less, while keeping the banter to a bare minimum. But those brief, brisk songs contained multitudes. “The reason Sinatra was my favorite singer was his phrasing,” Nelson told me. “He never sang a song the same way twice. I don’t think I do either.” Nelson is indeed one of music’s great iterators, with a Sinatraesque knack for daubing in different colors, rendering old songs in revelatory new ways. His gift is to make that art seem artless, camouflaging technique with naturalism. His unruffled vocal tone is unmistakable and unchanging; songs roll out as natural as speech, as if he were not singing so much as thinking out loud. These effects rest on Nelson’s rhythmic play: His vocal phrases and guitar solos glide over the meter, lagging behind the beat or charging ahead, bringing suspense to every note and syllable. There is a term for this kind of derring-do — rubato — but Mickey Raphael, Nelson’s longtime harmonica player in the road band known as the Family, puts it another way. “That’s Willie’s prerogative,” Raphael says. “He goes where he goes. Our task is to follow him.”It’s not an easy gig. At the Austin show, Nelson’s regular bassist, Kevin Smith, was sidelined with Covid, so he had brought in Robert Kearns, who normally plays with Sheryl Crow. Kearns had less than a day’s notice; the band never rehearses and, “Whiskey River” aside, doesn’t have a set list. Nelson sometimes counsels musicians to feel, not count — to disburden themselves of metronomic ideas about tempo and go with the flow. But that’s easier said than done, and you could hear Kearns laboring to keep track of Nelson’s floating cadences and hairpin turns. “Willie pulled out every trick, every idiosyncrasy,” Raphael said later. “Robert’s a great, great bass player. But all he could do was, you know, just kind of hang on.”Nelson finished the set with a jaunty rendition of an old Mac Davis number, “It’s Hard to Be Humble.” About 90 minutes later, he reappeared onstage, joining Strait for a couple of duets. They did “Sing One With Willie,” a goofy crowd-pleaser, and the Townes Van Zandt ballad “Pancho and Lefty,” featuring a searching guitar solo from Nelson. As Nelson made his way offstage, Strait told the crowd, “You know, it’s Willie’s birthday,” and then led a chorus of “Happy Birthday.” Nelson boarded a golf cart, which whisked him through the audience and out of the arena. Soon he was on his bus, rolling through Austin, on his way out of town. The careers of successful musicians tend to follow predictable patterns. You break through in your 20s and perhaps hit your prime in your early 30s. Talent knows no age limit, but inspiration often has a sell-by date. As midlife sets in, you may lose contact with the muse. Tried-and-true moves grow stale, sounds and styles that once brimmed with character curdle into caricature. The day-to-day demands on musicians exact a greater toll. The thrill of life on the road fades, and the bummers — loneliness, boredom, long hours, bad food — become harder to bear. Willie Nelson is the exception that proves every rule. He hit his stride as a recording artist around age 40 and reached superstardom at 45. He has kept up a relentless pace ever since, recording thousands of songs while averaging more than 100 live dates per year, decade after decade. In 2022, his compulsion to sing and pick his guitar and ramble the roads is undiminished and, evidently, unappeasable. “Sometimes we’ll be off the road for three weeks or a month,” says Raphael, who has played with Nelson for 49 years. But then: “I’ll get a text from Willie, out of the blue, at some random hour of the day or night: ‘Let’s pick.’ The break might have just started, and he’s ready to get back out there.”As Nelson has rounded the bend into old age, another unusual thing has happened: He has been making more music. He has had a very busy 21st century, producing a staggering 36 albums of new material since the turn of the millennium. He has recorded collections of children’s music and songbook standards and country-and-Western jukebox hits. He has released tribute albums to Sinatra, to George and Ira Gershwin, to the songwriter Cindy Walker. He has done album-length collaborations with indie rockers, with Western-swing revival bands, with Wynton Marsalis and members of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. He made a gospel-themed album with his sister and four of his children. He put out a reggae record, and it wasn’t embarrassing. He’s said to have hundreds more recent recordings in the can. The Willie Nelson of 2022 is an anomaly, perhaps unprecedented in popular music: His discography stretches back to the Eisenhower era, and he remains one of America’s busiest working musicians. “It’s a decent job,” he says. “Best one I’ve had, at least.”Nelson’s songs unspool in the voice of a man who has gazed into the abyss and come back drawling punch lines.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesIn the past five years alone, Nelson has produced nine albums. On these records we hear more than the sound of a famous voice reinterpreting familiar material. Nelson’s catalog of original songs has been growing and taking on heft: Many new songs find him reckoning with the weighty matter of his own dwindling days. Death has always had a place in Nelson’s work. (A singer steeped in the earthy existentialism of country and blues could hardly avoid the topic.) But in recent times, it has become his Topic A.This may be shrewd business. Albums of this sort are recording-industry mainstays; Nelson’s old pal and collaborator Johnny Cash won critical raves for a string of late-life releases that focused on his own impending demise. But where Cash’s mortality music was brooding and gothic, Nelson’s is Nelsonian: mischievous, droll, intrigued by cosmic conundrums and amused by the state of his own mortal flesh. The songs unspool in the voice of a man who has gazed into the abyss and come back drawling punch lines: “Heaven is closed and hell’s overcrowded/So I think I’ll just stay where I am.” Sometimes he allows himself a flight into the mystical, imagining his transmutation into a “blue star” in the night sky, or envisioning a jam session in the afterlife with departed musical comrades. Sometimes his jokes verge on metaphysical riddles: “I don’t go to funerals/I won’t be at mine.”“Death is just a pretty good subject to write about,” he says. “It’s good material.”When tracer bullets aren’t flying overhead, the land that Nelson christened Luck Ranch is a rather nice place to spend time. (“When you’re here, you’re in Luck,” he is fond of saying. “When you’re not here, you’re out of Luck.”) The ranch rolls across 700 acres, dotted with cedar and juniper trees. Like much of the region’s pastureland, the Nelsons’ acreage has been damaged by overgrazing and erosion, and the couple has undertaken a program of regenerative agriculture to restore the soil and revive the native flora. Dozens of horses wander the ranch; most are rescues, adopted so they wouldn’t be sent to the slaughterhouse. For years, Nelson was prone to wandering the property himself, usually at high velocity. “I liked to bust through those cedars,” he says, “either on a horse or in a pickup truck.”The ranch is home to other animals too: sheep, pigs, chickens. This came in handy during the Covid lockdown. “If we were low on eggs,” Annie says, “I could go grab some from under a chicken butt.” She cooked the family meals, and to streamline the operation, the Nelsons came up with a menu they nicknamed the Pandemic Pantry: vegan meatloaf on Mondays, tacos on Tuesdays, etc. (“The deal was: If you want something else, make it yourself,” Annie says.) Tensions can creep in when you’re sequestering for long stretches, perhaps especially among strong-willed people with artistic dispositions. The Nelsons maintained harmony with a set of rules that have become famous among fans, reproduced on swag for sale at shows:1. Don’t be an [expletive]. 2. Don’t be an [expletive]. 3. Don’t be a goddamn [expletive].“They’re good rules, but we’ve all broken them,” Nelson says. “I’ve definitely broken Rule No. 3. My loved ones will confirm that.”Annie is Nelson’s fourth wife. She is also, he has often said, the love of his life. They met in 1986, in Arizona, on the set of the made-for-television Western drama “Stagecoach,” where she was working as a makeup artist. They first bonded over the question of Nelson’s hair, which they agreed he did not need to cut short in order to play the role of Doc Holliday. But a relationship seemed unlikely. Ann Marie D’Angelo was 30, Nelson was 53. She had vowed never to date celebrities or get involved with men who had messy marital backgrounds or children. Nelson was separated but not yet divorced from his third wife; he had five kids, one of whom was born to the woman who would become Wife No. 3 at a time when he was still married to No. 2. But Nelson and D’Angelo were both quick-witted, tough-minded and warm — a good match. He pursued her ardently; they fell in love. Lukas Autry Nelson was born on Christmas Day 1988; Jacob Micah Nelson arrived in May 1990. Willie and Annie were married in 1991.Nelson considers Luck his true home, but the Nelsons raised their sons far away, in an oceanfront house on the northern coast of Maui. Nelson, of course, was often gone, on the road up to 200 days a year. Lukas and Micah grew up surrounded by musical equipment and taught themselves to play, bashing out classic-rock songs in a band room near the little building in the rear of the house where Nelson gathered with friends when he was not on tour. While Nelson got high and played poker, he followed his sons’ increasingly tighter and more assured renditions of Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd songs. “I always looked at music as a way to get closer to my dad,” Lukas says. “There was never any pressure about it. But I knew that he loved music so much, and that if I did it, too, I’d make him happy, and we’d be able to spend more time together.”Today Lukas, 33, is a star in his own right: a gifted songwriter and guitarist with a reedy vocal tone reminiscent of his father’s. His acclaimed roots-rock quintet, Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real, has released eight full-length albums and served as Neil Young’s backing band. (They were also the backing band for the fictional singer played by Bradley Cooper in the 2018 “A Star Is Born” remake, whose soundtrack includes eight songs co-written by Lukas.) Micah, 32, is a sometime Promise of the Real member himself, joining the band on its tours with Young; he also records solo work, which tilts toward the noisy and experimental, under the moniker Particle Kid. The nickname was coined one day when he was 14 and his (very stoned) father tried and failed to say the phrase “prodigal son.” Nelson has played and recorded with his daughters Paula, 52, and Amy, 49. Now Lukas and Micah have become his musical right-hand men, with an intimate view of his late-life creative burst. “He’s been making some of the best music he’s ever made,” Micah says. “He’s singing and writing songs now that he couldn’t have written at 30 or 40. He’s decorating the story of his life, and he’ll continue to do it till he’s no longer breathing.”His discography stretches back to the Eisenhower era, and he remains one of America’s busiest working musicians. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesA theme that has run through Nelson’s songs from the beginning is his hunger for the road. It was there, obliquely, in his very first single, written and recorded in 1957, a lament about a failed romance whose refrain is a nomad’s itchy motto: “This is no place for me.” Perhaps his most intriguing disquisition on the subject is “Still Is Still Moving to Me” (1993), one of his signature songs, a kind of koan set to a backbeat and spaghetti-Western guitar. “I can be moving or I can be still,” he sings. “But still is still moving to me.” Precisely what he’s getting at is uncertain; in the song, he concedes he is straining to express elusive and ineffable ideas. “It’s hard to explain how I feel/It won’t go in words but I know that it’s real.”“He wants to move,” Lukas says. “He needs to move. He needs to roam the land and play his music and be free. He’s been moving since he was a very young kid. He’s been in the hustle of the times ever since he left the cotton fields in Abbott, Texas.”Abbott, a small town about 25 miles north of Waco, is where Nelson was born, in 1933. When he was 6 months old, his young parents split up, leaving Willie and his 2-year-old sister, Bobbie, in the care of their paternal grandparents. Nelson sees this as a stroke of good fortune. His grandparents, Nancy and Alfred — “Mama and Daddy Nelson” — were devoted and conscientious caretakers. They were also musicians. Mama gave singing lessons from home; Daddy, a blacksmith, played guitar. By the time Willie was 6, he had his first six-string and was learning to play chords and write songs. Bobbie was a piano prodigy who seemed to instantly assimilate new styles; she would become her brother’s enduring musical collaborator and “closest friend for a whole lifetime.”To grow up in rural Texas during the Depression was to know an existence defined by struggle and want. But musically, Abbott held riches. Willie basked in the hymns at the United Methodist Church. The radio transmitted enthralling sounds, too: the Western swing of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Tin Pan Alley hits like “Stardust” and “All the Things You Are.” Willie was also captivated by the music he heard at movie matinees, especially the drifter anthems sung by Hollywood cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. And he worked alongside his sister and grandmother in the cotton fields, where other songs rang out. “There were a few of us white people out there,” he says. “But over here, there’d be Mexicans singing mariachis. And over there, you’d hear a Black guy singing the blues.” The trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis recalls a revealing backstage moment. “It was me, Willie, B.B. King, Ray Charles and Eric Clapton,” he says, all shooting the breeze — “and Willie said: ‘Well, gentlemen, I think I’m the only one here who actually picked cotton.’” Everyone burst into laughter. “Willie has had some profound experiences,” Marsalis says. “His music, his knowledge, comes from a long, long way.”At 10, Nelson joined a Czech polka band that played beer halls; when he and Bobbie were teenagers, they formed a dance band with Bobbie’s young husband. He graduated from high school in 1950, served in the Air Force for nine months (he received a medical discharge for a bad back), then tried college at Baylor University in Waco before dropping out to pursue music. He married his first wife, Martha, at 19, and had three children in short order. For the next several years, he bounced around the country while working a series of jobs (saddle maker, dishwasher, door-to-door salesman) and honing his craft. Eventually he made his way to Nashville, where he gained a reputation as an uncommonly gifted songwriter. Had he never succeeded as a performer, the handful of hits he wrote in the late 1950s and early ’60s might have secured his legend anyway. Songs like “Family Bible,” “Hello Walls” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” were miracles of concision, speaking volumes in spare words while smuggling in melodic and harmonic twists. The torch song “Crazy,” a hit for Patsy Cline in 1961, poured out heartache in a swooping tune that sounded more jazz than country. “Night Life,” a hit for Ray Price two years later, showed Nelson’s genius for poetic plain-speaking: “The night life ain’t no good life/But it’s my life.”Nelson on television in 1962, the year his first album was released.Johnny Franklin/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“He’s one of those extraordinary songwriters who embodies a genre and transcends it,” Elvis Costello says. “He’s got an ear for changes, for passing tones, that aren’t found in country songs at all. I think I knew ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ for 20 years before I realized the ‘Nelson’ on the songwriting credit was Willie Nelson — I assumed it was an old jazz ballad.”Nelson got a record deal with RCA Victor in 1964 and released a string of LPs, but he bridled under the label chief, Chet Atkins, who favored the ornate production of the so-called Nashville Sound. In 1969, Nelson bought a new guitar, a nylon-string Martin N-20, which he fitted with a pickup to produce a tone reminiscent of one of his musical gods, the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. He named the guitar Trigger, after Roy Rogers’s horse, and before long his fingers had worn a hole in the soft spruce above its bridge. His music was getting more scraped and scarred, too, its Music Row sheen peeling away as he sought a starker sound. In 1971 he recorded “Yesterday’s Wine,” a concept album about the life and death of an “imperfect man.” He thought it was the most honest LP he’d ever made; an RCA executive called it “some far-out [expletive] that maybe the hippies high on dope can understand.”Nelson had run his course in Music City. He moved back to Texas and considered taking up pig farming. But while visiting Nashville in 1972, he attended a house party where songwriters were playing their tunes and, late at night, offered some of his own new material. Among the small crowd still present was the Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler, who astonished Nelson by offering him both a contract and creative freedom. (Forget commerce, Wexler said: “You’re going for art.”) What followed was groundbreaking: The LPs “Shotgun Willie” (1973), “Phases and Stages” (1974) and “Red Headed Stranger” (1975) cleared a path forward for country music by looking to the past, combining the attitude and ambition of album rock with the raw, rootsy sounds of honky-tonk, bluegrass, folk and gospel. Nelson in an Atlantic Records studio in 1973 with, from left, the producer Arif Mardin; his sister, band pianist and “closest friend,” Bobbie Nelson; and his drummer, Paul English.David Gahr/Getty ImagesNelson’s new direction reflected the ferment of his home in Austin, where hippies and rednecks rubbed shoulders and a funky new species, the hippie-redneck, emerged. The figureheads of this scene were Nelson and the band he assembled after moving to town in 1972. The Family — Bobbie Nelson (piano), Mickey Raphael (harmonica), Bee Spears (bass), Jody Payne (guitar) and Paul English (drums) — wore long hair and thick beards, jettisoning Grand Ole Opry rhinestones for jeans and T-shirts. The look was anti-establishment, with a hint of menace. English was the group’s muscle, ready to straighten things out when club owners stiffed the band; he was rumored to carry two guns at all times. (Nelson immortalized their relationship in one of his most beloved songs, “Me and Paul.”) A platinum-selling 1976 compilation, “Wanted! The Outlaws,” gave the movement a name and established its commercial bona fides: “Outlaw country” would prove a sales juggernaut, minting new stars (Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson) and invigorating the careers of renegade veterans (Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard). The biggest success was Nelson. “Red Headed Stranger” was his first true hit album. Then, in 1978, came a blockbuster, “Stardust,” a collection of standards that stayed on the country album charts for a full decade, establishing the cowboy warbler as an interpreter of the American Songbook on par with the greatest jazz vocalists. In the years that followed, Nelson reached superstardom, attaining a presence in popular culture that arguably no other country singer has, unless Taylor Swift counts as a country singer. He starred in motion pictures. He visited the White House on numerous occasions. (On one visit, he got high on the roof with President Carter’s son Chip.) He did a public service announcement for NASA alongside Frank Sinatra and had a huge international hit with Julio Iglesias, the oily and absurd “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” He was one of few country artists to join the pop, soul and rock demigods on the charity single “We Are the World.” Nelson at his annual Fourth of July Picnic in 1974.Bettmann/Getty ImagesNelson’s renown is bound up with his image as a rebel, a reputation enhanced by his yearslong showdown with the Internal Revenue Service (which seized a good share of his assets in 1990) and his multiple busts for marijuana possession. A decent case could be made that he is history’s most famous pothead, the man whose likeness should be carved into the golden bong of posterity. For decades, he has been an advocate for legalization, and in 2015 he launched the cannabis company Willie’s Reserve (tagline: “My stash is your stash”). You can hear a stoner sagacity in both his lyrics and the way he sings them — in the freedom of his rubato, his gliding excursions through musical space-time.Nelson is a scrambler of categories. He’s down-home and urbane, countercultural and traditional, a political progressive who occupies the loftiest perch in America’s most conservative musical genre. (Presumably, many fans in his home state take issue with his endorsement of Beto O’Rourke and his call to support Texas Democrats in their fight against voter suppression.) It’s impossible to name a white performer more steeped in qualities we associate with Black music — syncopation, improvisation, blue notes, the push and pull between sacred and earthly yearnings — yet not a trace of minstrelsy can be detected in his sound. He is always — indubitably, irreducibly — Willie Nelson.The most striking feature of his career is not length but breadth. There appear to be no songs he can’t sing and few he hasn’t. Though nominally a country artist, he is really more like an American musical unconscious, tapped into the deepest wellsprings of popular song. He has a way of making everything he sings — from “Amazing Grace” and “Danny Boy” to “Time After Time” (the Cyndi Lauper song) and “The Rainbow Connection” (the Kermit the Frog song) — sound Platonic and primordial. The only comparable figures, according to Marsalis, are Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong. “To be great in all the forms that Willie is great in — it’s extremely rare,” he says. “He has whatever that spiritual thing is, that thing you can’t describe. It’s like a shamanistic type of insight into the nature of all things. From that place of understanding, he can play anything he wants to play that comes out of the American tradition.” Nelson as part of the Highwaymen, with Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, in 1992.Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty ImagesFor a guy who makes so many records, Nelson doesn’t spend much time in recording studios. He is a legendarily speedy worker. “He records fast because he has zero patience,” says Micah Nelson. There are tales of sessions in which Nelson materialized to make a guest appearance on someone’s record, laid down a vocal track or guitar solo in a single spotless take and then left as quickly as he’d come, roaring off on his tour bus.Pedernales Recording Studio, which Nelson built in the early 1980s, sits one mile from Luck Ranch, adjacent to a 9-hole golf course Nelson also owns. Buddy Cannon, 75, is a veteran Nashville songwriter and producer who has overseen much of Nelson’s recent work there. The two first met in the late 1970s in Amarillo, Texas, at a promotional concert, when a mutual friend asked Cannon if he wanted to smoke a joint with Nelson. (“It’s a pretty good way to meet Willie Nelson, smoking a joint in a broom closet,” Cannon says. “I probably wasn’t the first guy to meet him that way.”) They met again three decades later, in Nashville. Cannon was producing a 2007 Kenny Chesney session for which Nelson had agreed to sing a duet. Nelson liked the sound of the recording so much that he hired Cannon to produce his next album, “Moment of Forever.” They’ve gone on to make 15 more albums, with Cannon assuming not only mixing-board duties but also a role as Nelson’s songwriting partner. Their working relationship is one neither could have envisioned when joints were passed in broom closets: They write via text message, volleying lyrics back and forth. Usually Cannon will arrive at the studio with a rough outline of a tune, but it is Nelson who does the finishing work, improvising while the tape rolls. As a producer, Cannon’s goal is to be as unobtrusive as possible, offering the cleanest view of what he calls Willie World. “I try to treat his music the way it treats us,” Cannon says. “I just try to capture the Willie vibe.”Sometimes the vibe arrives unbidden, overnight, in Cannon’s iPhone. On the morning of July 29, 2020, he awoke to a text from Nelson, the first verse of a prospective new song.Imagine what you want then get out of the wayRemember energy follows thought so be careful what you saySo be careful what you ask forMake sure it’s really what you wantBecause your mind is made for thinkingAnd energy follows thought“Write a verse,” Nelson added. “If you like it.” Cannon came up with some lines about how wisdom is dispensed in dreams and through the intercession of spirits, and the songwriters traded messages until Nelson was convinced they’d done the job. The result, “Energy Follows Thought,” is the emotional — or cosmological — centerpiece of Nelson’s latest album, “A Beautiful Time.” It’s a stately ballad, crooned by Nelson in confiding tones over shivering, echoing production. A kick drum beats out a low, steady pulse; Nelson’s guitar rumbles and probes. The sound is both intimate and gigantic, like a lullaby sung in an amphitheater on the moon. Nelson says the song is “one of my philosophies.” To Mickey Raphael, the harmonica player, it “scratches on quantum physics.” But with its talk of ghostly visitors that speak through dreams, “Energy Follows Thought” may well be another lion-in-winter anthem, one more shadowy rumination on what lies beyond. The cover of “A Beautiful Time” shows Nelson striding, guitar in hand, into a blazing sunset.“He’s lost so many people, so many loved ones,” Annie says. In 1991, Nelson’s son Billy, one of the three children from his first marriage, committed suicide at age 33. Those close to Nelson say that he’s been hit hard by the deaths of friends and fellow travelers, like Cash and Haggard and Ray Price. Recently he has endured the losses of even closer musical compatriots. Paul English passed in February 2020. On March 10 of this year, Bobbie Nelson died in hospice care in Austin. “I don’t want to be the last man standing/On second thought, maybe I do,” Nelson sang in 2018. It was a good line, another wisecrack at Pale Death’s expense. But truth lurks behind the quip. It is hard to be the last man standing. And he really doesn’t go to funerals.Nelson in April.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesOn May 4, less than a week after Nelson’s 89th birthday, Willie and Annie were in Nashville. The singer woke up in the middle of the night, on his tour bus, struggling to breathe. A health care worker was summoned. A rapid PCR test was administered. Nelson was Covid positive.“I had a nebulizer on the bus,” Annie says. “I started everything I could at that point, including Paxlovid. He had the monoclonal antibodies. He had steroids.” They drove through the night and made it home to Spicewood, where Annie got a mobile medical unit out to the ranch. “We turned the house into a hospital,” she says. “There were a couple of times when I wasn’t sure he was going to make it.”“I had a pretty rough time with it,” Nelson allows. “Covid ain’t nothing to laugh at, that’s for sure.”Six days after taking ill, he was out of the woods. Two weeks after that, he was back on tour, playing a pair of shows in New Braunfels, Texas. From there it was on to Little Rock, Ark.; Oklahoma City; Camdenton, Mo.; Wichita, Kan.; El Dorado, Ark.; St. Louis; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Noblesville, Ind.; and Franklin, Tenn. On the afternoon of June 29, the Honeysuckle Rose — the fifth custom-designed Willie Nelson tour bus to bear that name — pulled into a parking lot outside a hotel in Louisville, Ky. His bandmates and road crew usually stay in hotels, but Nelson himself only ever sleeps on the bus. He has spent many nights there — many years, if you crunch the numbers. There are occasions when he has chosen to sleep on the bus even when it was parked in the driveway of one of his palatial homes. “There’s everything you need right here,” he said, from the kitchen area. “Good food to eat. Two bathrooms. A shower. A nice bed. If I felt like writing a song, I bet I could find a guitar in here somewhere.”The Honeysuckle Rose looms large in Willie lore. Vast sums have changed hands on the bus, in games of poker and dominoes. A president has visited (Carter), as have innumerable musicians, movie stars, journalists and members of law enforcement, like the Louisiana State Police officers who paid a visit in 2006 and extracted 1.5 pounds of marijuana and 3 ounces of psychedelic mushrooms. Many have boarded the Honeysuckle Rose with a spring in their step and, sometime later, staggered off, having taken too many hits of Nelson’s powerful weed. Often one hit was too many.The scene these days is less freewheeling. Nelson is supposed to have given up smoking marijuana in favor of an edibles-only regimen. (“It wasn’t good for my lungs,” he says.) The pandemic has also brought changes to his touring routine. With occasional exceptions, like the birthday show at the Moody Center, he plays only outdoors. Daily Covid tests are mandatory for everyone in the band and crew; masking is obligatory backstage. Onstage, musicians are instructed to give Nelson at least six feet of room. The most zealous enforcer of these protocols is Annie Nelson. “If I have to be the bad guy to keep him safe, I’ll be the bad guy,” she says. “A virus doesn’t care who you are, what you believe, how famous you are.” Health concerns have forced Nelson to scale back his touring schedule. His concerts are carefully spaced, with far fewer dates stacked up, giving the singer time to rest and recuperate. He’s on the road again, but he may never again hit the 100-show-​per-year marker that was, for years, the bare minimum.Mark Rothbaum, Nelson’s manager, does not regard his 89-year-old artist as a legacy act. “I want everyone to know him, everyone to see him,” he says. “If he’s playing and it’s 3,000 people, well, I’d rather it be 300,000 people.” Nevertheless, legacy management — getting an official history on the record — is a priority. Live recordings are being exhumed from archives. A multipart documentary in the works aims to chronicle Nelson’s “extraordinary life and career.” The singer himself has co-authored a number of books — memoirs, folksy works of fiction, collections of essays and aphorisms. The latest, “Me and Paul: Untold Stories of a Fabled Friendship,” will be published in September.And there are the new records. The next studio album — No. 98, give or take — is a tribute to the Nashville songwriting ace Harlan Howard; it will probably be out early in 2023. “My attitude always is: What’s next?” Rothbaum says. “What’s the next record? Where’s the next show? Where’s the bus headed? Willie likes to keep things rolling forward, and so do I.” Nominally a country artist, Nelson is really more like an American musical unconscious, tapped into the deepest wellsprings of popular song. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesA priority is “getting Willie out with his people”: not just putting him on tour, but booking special shows with artists who are his heirs and disciples. The concerts are logistically trickier than ever, what with the Covid precautions, but there is no thought of stopping. Younger musicians are eager — ecstatic, usually — to work with Nelson; he, as ever, is up for a picking party, and seems to enjoy the adulation. Sometimes these events take place, literally, in Nelson’s backyard. In 1985, a replica Old West town was built on Nelson’s property for the filming of the motion picture “Red Headed Stranger,” loosely inspired by his 1975 album; Nelson preserved the set and eventually installed an outdoor stage and sound system. This became the setting for occasional one-off concerts and special events, including the Luck Reunion, a festival held each March that draws thousands. There are also the birthdays, big occasions in Willie World. For Nelson’s 90th, next year, Rothbaum is planning the largest celebration yet, perhaps stretching over two days, maybe at the Hollywood Bowl. The guest performers, he says, will include “everyone you can think of.” Another staple is Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic, a daylong concert, headlined by Nelson, that has been going since 1973. This year’s edition — the first since 2019, because of the pandemic — took place in Austin, at the 20,000 seat Q2 Stadium, home of the city’s Major League Soccer franchise. The supporting acts on the bill included Jason Isbell, Allison Russell and other young stars representing country music’s progressive wing. The paying audience was a typical Willie crowd: a cross section of humanity that seemed to represent every gradation on the local social spectrum, from hick to hipster. It was multigenerational, overwhelmingly but not entirely white and fashion-forward, in its way. There were cowboy hats and lots of American-flag-themed apparel, worn with greater and lesser degrees of irony. A sizable number of those in attendance were men and women in their 20s and 30s decked out in period-perfect redneck-hippie chic: big boots, big belt buckles, big beards, lots of hair. At a Willie Nelson concert, it’s always 1973 in spirit.The man himself arrived onstage wearing his own version of patriotic garb: an oversize U.S. men’s soccer team jersey bearing the uniform number 420. Walking is difficult for Nelson, especially after his bout with Covid. He gets winded quickly; a few steps can leave him gasping. When he sings and plays, though, the signs of strain ease. “According to the doctors, singing is the best exercise for the lungs,” he says. “I think that’s true.” At the picnic he was in robust voice, pushing out his songs with power, agility and flair. “Whiskey River” came first, of course, delivered in an insolent purr. Ballads unfurled in whispers and croons; livelier numbers were sung with snap, sometimes in a thick twang that Nelson seemed to have dragged out of the 1930s for the occasion. Seated to his left was the Particle Kid, Micah, who played rhythm guitar and got a star turn on a number whose lyrical hook — “If I die when I’m high, I’ll be halfway to heaven” — came from a quip by Nelson at the dominoes table during Covid lockdown. (When Micah told his dad that the phrase would make a great song, Nelson said: “You write it.”) Early in the set, the band cued up “On the Road Again,” and Beto O’Rourke dashed onstage with his own 11-year-old son to strum an acoustic and shout along.Nelson played some fine guitar. During “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” one of his most lustrous love songs, he took a solo that gusted between genres and across borders, flowing past in a blur of swinging syncopations and block chords and hard strumming that pulled in Gypsy jazz, Texas blues, mariachi, even flashes of surf rock. The performance brought whoops from the crowd and, when he reached Bar No. 16, drew an impressed head shake from Nelson, in the split second before he sang the next line — a fond farewell to a lover that, on this occasion, sounded more like a guitar hero urging himself on. “Fly on,” he sang. “Fly on past the speed of sound.”Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine. His book “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle” was published in April. Philip Montgomery is a photographer whose work examines the fractured state of America. His new monograph of photography, “American Mirror,” is a chronicle of the country’s historic struggles over a decade. More

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      in Music

      Upending Expectations for Indigenous Music, Noisily

      by

      After long being consigned to a legacy of stereotypes, Indigenous American artists are making some of the country’s most engaging experimental music.Raven Chacon wasn’t sure he should accept the commission that would soon earn him the Pulitzer Prize for music. A Milwaukee ensemble had asked Chacon — a Diné composer, improviser and visual artist born on the edge of the Navajo Nation — to write a piece for its annual Thanksgiving concert in 2021, slated for a 175-year-old cathedral downtown. The offer smacked of cliché, another act of holiday tokenism.“My impulse is to turn down any Thanksgiving invitation, not because I’m anti-Thanksgiving but because that’s the only time we get asked to do stuff,” Chacon, 44, said in a recent phone interview.But he slowly reconsidered, recognizing that performing on Thanksgiving in a cathedral (with an enormous pipe organ, no less) offered a rare opportunity to address the Catholic Church’s violent role in the conquest of Native Americans. He penned “Voiceless Mass” and, at the premiere, positioned violinists, flutists and percussionists around the seated audience, their parts cresting through a hangdog drone.“If you hear there’s a Native composer, a lot of assumptions happen,” Chacon said, recounting the times that even fans have said they hear the desert in his music. “But I am interested in what’s important to the community I represent — land, justice, injustice. It’s meaningful for me to make work that is challenging, not easy to digest.”When “Voiceless Mass” won the Pulitzer in May, Chacon became the first Native American to be awarded the prize. That honor is part of a recent rush of representation and recognition for Indigenous American artists in literature, food and streaming TV, increasingly prevalent since the galvanizing protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline began at Standing Rock in 2016. “The best of our artists are really good, and people are catching up,” Paul Chaat Smith, a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, said in an interview. “That means we’re not always starting from square one.”Raven Chacon’s “Voiceless Mass” won the Pulitzer in May. “If you hear there’s a Native composer, a lot of assumptions happen,” he said.Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesBut Chacon is also the first harsh noise musician to win the Pulitzer, an unlikely ascent for someone who started making music on the Navajo Nation by turning snare drums into amplified feedback chambers before becoming a fixture of experimental spaces in Los Angeles. Indeed, he is just one of a loose confederation of Indigenous artists finding a wider audience by working at the fringes of modern music. The immersive sound art of Suzanne Kite, the self-made scrapyard instrumentation of Warren Realrider, the scabrous violin solos of Laura Ortman — these musicians and many of their peers are rapidly upending ideas about what it means to sound Native.Nathan Young, another prolific musician, was just a child in Tahlequah, Okla., the capital of the Cherokee Nation, when he realized the story of Native American music was deeper than powwow incantations. His father, a member of the Delaware Tribe, traded rare tapes of all-night peyote ceremonies from the Native American Church, cherishing the hypnotic melodies of singers like Joe Rush.“I thought about the sounds our ancestors made that we could never imagine, how we might not be considering what could be ‘Native music,’” Young, 46, said from his home in Tulsa, wondering what had been lost through centuries of genocide.During college, a VHS tape of the Japanese electronics icon Merzbow widened Young’s sense of what music could be, as did a subsequent home recording that Maori artists in New Zealand played while giving him a traditional Ta moko tattoo. “It was them rubbing rocks against rocks, making this ‘primitive ambient music,’” Young said. “Hearing other Indigenous people express those sounds made me realize I wasn’t the only one who thought this way, interested in this noise.”Back in Oklahoma, Young joined Postcommodity, an influential Indigenous collective that included Chacon. Soon he was running the label Peyote Tapes and recording dozens of albums with the aggressive, distortion-driven duo Ajilvsga.Where Young pushed against the preconception that all Native American music included the chants and drums of powwows, Joe Rainey leaned into the typecasting. Raised near Little Earth, a Minneapolis housing complex that has for decades been home to members of dozens of tribes, Rainey began taping powwows when he was 8. Using a hand-held GE cassette recorder, he amassed an estimated 500 hours of performances.“This album helped me make sure I was mentally OK,” Rainey said of “Niineta.”Erinn Springer for The New York TimesRainey has collected an estimated 500 hours of performances at powwows.Erinn Springer for The New York TimesFor more than 20 years, Rainey, an HVAC installer and a father of five, has also been a competitive powwow singer, sometimes vying for prizes of $10,000. Misconceptions of modern powwows as sacred spaces bemuse the Ojibwe singer. “To you, we might be conjuring energies,” Rainey, 35, joked in an interview from his home in Oneida, Wis. “But we’re showing up to just have fun, singing and dancing.”By the summer of 2020, Rainey had been partnering with the veteran Minneapolis producer Andrew Broder for a year, trying but failing to find a fitting modern context for his songs and samples. When Broder attended a powwow between the buildings of Little Earth, he understood he’d been mishandling the material.“The sound wasn’t unlike the way a car driving around with a booming system fits into a city’s landscape,” Broder said by phone. “These voices and the drum bouncing off the walls of the projects had a similar quality. That was where I wanted to go, where the sound was smeared out.”Broder and Rainey began operating around an axiom of “organized chaos,” using Public Enemy’s abrasive Bomb Squad productions and Nas’s narrative candor as twin lodestars. The resulting “Niineta” — which was released in May and whose title is Ojibwe for “just me” — pins layers of powwow songs to industrial-strength drums and blizzards of static, suggesting a radical musical representation of what Rainey often called the “urban Indian.” Samples of Rainey’s incarcerated cousin and dead friends supply a gravitas as he sorts loudly through grief.“This album helped me make sure I was mentally OK,” Rainey said. “Continuing on is what this album made me do.”A similar evolution also animates “Medicine Singers,” the self-titled July debut from a wild rock offshoot of the Eastern Medicine Singers, an Algonquin drum group based in northern Rhode Island. The album is a collaboration with Yonatan Gat, an Israeli-born guitarist who first earned attention in the feral rock band Monotonix and has since started a label to collaborate with traditional musicians around the world. Gat encountered the Eastern Medicine Singers at South by Southwest in 2017, then formed ad hoc bands with the likes of the new-age pioneer Laraaji and the powerful drummer Thor Harris to improvise with them.The Medicine Singers’ founder, Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson, worried they might bend those historic sounds until they broke. A 62-year-old Air Force veteran who learned the Massachusett language only as an adult, Jamieson asked his mentor, Donald Three Bears Fisher, to approve the lyrics for “Daybreak,” the album’s first single and an ecstatic aubade with pounding drums. “He said, ‘I want it played everywhere,’” Jamieson remembered in an interview. Fisher died in 2020. “So that’s what I’m doing.”Young has seen similar responses from elders in Oklahoma. “I come from an additive culture. Things fascinate us,” he said. “We are not trying to live in the past. We’re in this long conversation about how we can make these sounds work for what we want to express.”Still, reckoning with a past of forced removal and assimilation remains a vital component of this music. Ortman and Kite both began playing violin after they were adopted by white families. Ortman said she chose the instrument, which gave her permission to be someone else and a hope she would find her family, as she did among the White Mountain Apache Tribe in 2001.“Meeting my mother and older sister was like seeing eye-to-eye while the world is spinning around you,” Ortman, 49, said by phone. Many of her subsequent records have contemplated the life lost with her family; she often plays an Apache fiddle, made from an agave stalk, that she received during that reunion trip.“People You Must Look at Me,” an early performance piece by Kite, helped her process the loss of her mother, who died by suicide, and embrace her identity as an Indigenous artist whose ancestors escaped Wounded Knee by foot. Her work now incorporates a half-dozen other disciplines, including artificial intelligence — all ways of learning from Indigenous Americans’ past in order to reimagine their future.“I am not very interested in Western art music,” Kite admitted with a laugh. “There is too much to learn from community members who don’t have degrees. I see that as the pathway for generating new things.” More